Formative Assessments to Build Historical Inquiry Skills
Nathan Moe
As social studies educators, we know that guiding students to think like historians means more than having them memorize dates or recount facts. Real historical inquiry rests on a set of disciplinary practices—sourcing, contextualizing, close‐reading, and corroborating evidence—that require deliberate scaffolding and feedback.
Why Short, Targeted Tasks Matter
Traditional Document Based Questions (DBQs) are powerful but time‐intensive: students can spend hours wrestling with multiple documents, and teachers often require equally long hours to grade them. Moreover, because DBQs are such complex tasks, it can also be difficult to parse out student performance on individual competencies to give meaningful feedback. Perhaps we might heed English educator Michael Fordham when he suggests “We do not get better at a final performance simply by practicing the final performance: attend to the causes of later success by identifying the pre-conditions and prior steps that need to be in place rather than frequently practicing the final performance”.
Taking inspiration from the Digital Inquiry Group, To The Past has created Assessing Historical Thinking, a curated collection of formative, historical thinking focused assessments designed to take about 5-10 minutes to complete. Each task is focused on an isolated competency, asking students for instance to determine the relative strengths and limitations of a source’s evidence, to determine which contextual details help us better understand a source, or to evaluate inferences from evidence. Through this regular practice, teachers can pinpoint specific misunderstandings and address them before students attempt more complex assignments.
A Path Toward Deeper Inquiry
Perhaps most importantly, these assessments foster honest conversations about “why” historians ask these foundational questions of evidence. By isolating each step of evidence analysis—sourcing, contextualizing metadata, weighing strengths and limitations, and comparing competing accounts—teachers create a scaffolded environment in which students move from surface comprehension to nuanced judgment.
In A Letter Home: Heavy Losses, students examine two contrasting inferences about a historical source and determine which interpretation is more plausible. The task illuminates a central truth of historical inquiry: sources are open to multiple interpretations, but all interpretations must be grounded in evidence. Activities like this also cultivate the ability to consider the specificity and scope of claims, while also entering discussions regarding the strength, relevance and adequateness of evidence in support of an interpretation.
It’s a delight to hear students provide their careful readings in discussions with their peers: “I don’t think we can state that Hager is detached. Worn down, yes…but near the end of his letter he states that ‘the Germans would get no quarter from the 5th Artillery Brigade’. This suggests not indifference, but a strong determination or hardening of will. Based on what is provided in the letter, I think Person 1’s inference is more plausible”.
Continuing the Conversation
These are essential skills in historical inquiry, where students learn that the discipline is built not just on retrieving facts, but on crafting and testing claims using sufficient, and contextually grounded evidence.
Over time, these mini‐tasks produce stronger “pre-conditions”—the background knowledge, habits of mind, and procedural expertise—necessary for students to succeed on more complex tasks, such as DBQs, or extended research.
By embedding these quick, targeted formative assessments into everyday routines, we ensure that the next time students face a multifaceted historical prompt, they arrive not only with facts in hand but with the confidence and toolkit to ask the right questions, evaluate evidence critically, and construct well‐supported arguments. That is the promise of teaching history as inquiry—one formative step at a time.
All formative assessments are available for free from ToThePast.ca
